Many businesses currently use a number of different video technologies for collaboration and communication. A relatively recent addition to the mix are the small-group collaborative technologies such as Skype, Slack, and HipChat. Some of the interactions that take place on these platforms don't need to generate an artefact that endures; however, some do. At this point it makes good business sense to put in place a strategy to unify all of these systems. At minimum this should cover the management (recording, storage, search/discovery, and replay) of those sessions that require such treatment.
As the number and usefulness of these recordings increase, enterprises will choose to store and manage the recorded artefacts in one location in a single management platform.
2. A Boom in Video on Demand for Customer Support applications:
Consumers are increasingly seeking out help videos online when they need to figure out how to properly perform a task or make a transaction. As a result we expect more companies to add video on demand capabilities to their support sites, and to integrate these sites into their support operations. A branded consumer portal with a library of help videos is now easy to create and make available to customers; it is also just as easy to allow support agents access to this same repository in order to help better answer consumers’ questions.
It will likely be another year or two before two-way video support becomes popular at scale in a corporate context - especially for those businesses with large overseas support centre operations. However, taking advantage of the richness of video on demand in a support function is something that has very little standing in its way.
3. Popular live streaming & webcasting tools get a business makeover:
In the past year in the consumer world, we've witnessed the availability of a number of easy tools for broadcasting live over the web. Facebook and Youtube have both rolled out their own live service; they, along with tools like Periscope, make it fairly straightforward for anyone to set up a live stream and broadcast at scale.
As the consumerisation of IT continues, we expect to see a number of similar tools updated for corporate use - to include the necessary recording, compliance, and entitlement management features needed by the modern enterprise.
4. Businesses start to view set-top boxes as an effective marketing/communications tool:
Now that it is getting easier to deploy content to apps on set-top boxes (e.g. AppleTV, Roku, Amazon Fire, etc.) it will be natural for some enterprises to begin taking advantage of these technologies. And this will be not just for use in selling to consumers (especially with the Amazon platform) but also for internal employee communication.
While adoption will not be huge in 2017, we expect to see some early adopter companies developing their own channels for distributing videos of major corporate events, employee highlights, and employee-benefit related information.
